Some more things I found for Linux Audio considering Dante:
Also found this link:
https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2/issues/40
I’m assuming that with jackd everything on the network would show up in connections manager like Catia or Patchage?
@dsreyes
Yes that is the card and manufacturer I referenced earlier. I looked into the cost to import here and while I had a not insignificant amount of money set aside, I just couldn’t afford it. It would actually almost be cheaper for me to purchase a Dante enabled digital console with USB capabilities. Maybe it has changed since i looked into it. If, as your second link intimates, there is a Dante ALSA driver that can run on top of most PCI-E Dante cards, then I might invest in a rednet card and try it out at some point.
SeabladeOf course that thread also mentions only the commercial licensed driver from Audinate, which I am not sure on the pricing to license it in that case on top of the price of the card.
SeabladeHow much did the Four Audio PCIe card go for at the time you were looking into it? The FocusRite card is going for $1000.
@dsreyes
I am hesitant to mention dollar amounts as this was some time ago and prices may have changed, so suffice to say it was close to twice that after conversion and import IIRC. I had, at the time, enough set aside to order a Rednet card when I contacted them, I couldn’t stretch that to what I needed to in order to import one of their cards sadly. I will likely eventually just get a Rednet Dante->MADI device and an RME MADI card at some point.
SeabladeWell in the jack git link I provided one of them stated they were testing a FocusRite Dante PCIe card ($1000) and it was working with Audinate’s licensed driver. But I’m confused, in that same thread it was stated that there is already an ALSA Dante driver.
@dsreyes
So based off reading that thread there are two things I believe are occuring:
- Adrian Knoth (adiknoth) is likely using the driver and card from FourAudio (I believe he is the one that initially pointed me in their direction)
- Dell Green likely has a developer kit from Audinate (Brooklyn II Kit and Card, which I believe has a Linux SDK IIRC)
Audinate has flat out told me that they have no intention of releasing a Linux driver, that was years ago mind you so maybe things have changed, but I doubt it. My suspicion is that Dell Green is using the development kit but I do not know for certain. It would be worth contacting him I suppose just in case so I just added a comment there to see if he responds.
SeabladeFor everybody’s interest, Merging Technologies provides Windows/ASIO and MacOS/CoreAudio drivers and Virtual Sound Card for Ravenna since many years.
A MacOS/CoreAudio AES67 VAD has been released early this year and is available free of charge, please check http://www.merging.com/
Now, to complete the panorama, Merging is about to release a Linux ALSA driver/VAD for Ravenna/AES67, a few distributions are already in advanced testing. As a Linux/ALSA doesn’t deploy as easily as a Windows/Mac driver, anyone interested can contact us on http://www.merging.com/contact or directly to aes67@merging.com for discussing availability and deployment options.
That may allow an easy bridge to Dante since they are finally AES67 compatible.
Dominique
This is great to hear, sadly since Allen and Heath hasn’t updated the firmware on their dante cards yet, there is no AES67 support there yet that I know of, so knock off two of my systems there(Possibly more would have to think). I have to check on my Yamaha CL system though to see whether they support AES67 or not.
SeabladeI concur with seablade that this is great to hear. I don’t currently have the budget to change to AES67 hardware, but it does open up interesting possibilities for future upgrades.
How about the MOTU AVB interfaces? They have builtin 48 channel mixers for their devices and they just released firmware to use AVB as a separate interface. I’ve been reading up on the development for the Intel i210 cards that supports AVB on linux and thought this might be a possibility in the near future.
A very late reply to the Dante thing… Things didn’t get much better on Linux. They however did get better in the world of hardware, not so much im terms of PC hardware, but in terms of mixing consoles, breakout boxes, stage boxes, wireless microphone receivers etc. – Yamaha even uses only Dante on their recent digital mixing consoles and stage boxes and nothing else.
The Dante PCIe card is offered by several vendors, it looks more or less the same in all pictures. Apparently, the variant called LX-Dante by DigiGram comes with ALSA drivers: LX-DANTE - Support | Digigram
RME has a USB DigiFace Dante at around the same price point that should work in class-compliant mode, then not offering TotalMix. Additionally, it can convert MADI to DANTE standalone.
There’s the Dante Aviom 2x2 USB adaptor that should work for simple purposes.
So far I used none of these. I used the Dante Virtual Soundcard on OS X using MixBus for testing. This does a good job, but it doesn’t work on my old MacBook pro with any Dante latency below 11msec (4msec and 1msec are the other options). Also it seems to be pretty at its limits at 16 channels at 48khz. In Dante Controller you can get a statistics of dropped audio frames and it is not promising. I got dropouts when using 16 channels at 4msecs, I was okay at 11msecs.
So my conclusion for now is that albeit the Dante Virtual Soundcard would be really good to have on Linux, it probably wouldn’t be good enough for a 24channel/96khz recording studio setup. I’d like to use it to feed stereo playbacks into my digital mixing console without going analog.
Audinate recently announced a Dante embedded platform that they say will be available for Linux, too. In theory, and to my limited knowledge, this would allow to develop something like a Jack sink/source for Dante, but it might well be that legal restrictions wouldn’t allow for it.
Some people report AES67 to work well on Linux, but apparently it is not as easy to set up. Dante is really smooth to get going once you’ve understood a few basic things. Note that ES67 interoperability is a feature of the Dante devices. So far all recent devices I’ve seen would offer me to switch on AES67 mode in Dante Controller, older ones might not provide this. Note also that Dante Virtual Soundcard on Windows and OS X will not provide AES67, so you’d have to go entirely AES67 on a mixed PC platform setup.
Uh that sounds like very poor performance. I have used DVS with 64 channels @10mS without issue repeatedly on a variety of older Mac hardware, and done live processing at lower latencies, but not sure if I have done large channel counts at lower latencies or not.
I would strongly disagree with this statement for the record. While 96k is unusual for most Dante systems it is not out of the question, for instance one of the Digico systems I put in recently can run Dante at 96k and track like that.
Technically that was announced years ago (Got announced last time I attended Infocomm, which was pre-COVID by I believe a couple years), and I believe exists and is in use. For instance the QSYS system that runs Linux also has a Dante software license you can purchase, which indicates to me that it may well already be in use. The problem of course being that they charge a licensing fee, and don’t seem to be interested in making a native DVS client, but letting others develop products off it to put in embedded systems that run linux (ie. that QSYS system I mentioned).
SeabladeThe Ravenna driver which Merging Technology wrote is not maintained for kernel updates very well, but someone else has forked the driver to patch for newer kernels, and also created a GPL user space daemon to replace the binary only daemon that Merging provides for their original driver.
Andrea Bondavalli AES67 daemon and driver fork
I have had that AES67 daemon working with a Yamaha Dante stagebox in AES67 mode, but the Dante controller software that you have to use to configure Dante devices will not run under WINE, so you still need a Windows machine to set everything up (presumably an OS X machine would work as well).
I would prefer to get a native Ravenna interface, those almost universally have an embedded web server for configuring so you do not need any proprietary control applications, but so far Ravenna devices are still relatively expensive and relatively rare compared to Dante devices. I found the Yamaha interface for US$600 on eBay, the equivalent Ravenna device would be a Merging Hapi which goes for anywhere from US$4000 to US$5000 on Reverb. Out of my budget for the foreseeable future.
Seablade, I strongly appreciate your disagreement on the DVS on OS X. 
I’m just reporting my findings on an MacBook Pro 2017 (version with two Thunderbolt ports). Performance might also depend on the NIC in use, so Mac computers with different USB NICs or even built-in ones might be better. Which indicates a typical problem, while you could force realtime priorities on (PCIe) audio interfaces, it may be harder to do so on network traffic.
The Dante Virtual Soundcard (DVS) seems to be quite reliable on Windows embedded. I regularly encounter a Newtek Tricaster video switcher which internally is a Windows embedded system apparently running on DVS. No Dante issues so far.
In general it is a good idea to check the dropout/latency statistics view in Dante Controller when setting up a new system.
A bridge to ALSA or (better) Jack using Audinate’s embedded code as a payware product would make sense to me. That would involve paying fees to Audinate by the manufacturer of such a bridge. Not unlikely for the QSYS system to be quite related to that idea. Quite naturally I prefer open source, but then again, especially when not working on a fixed setup but on a mobile one, easy of use is key.
It is also unfortunate that Dante Controller is not available for Linux, even though large parts of it are written in Java. Exploring its JARs however reveals some platform dependent binary code.
So my Dante AVIO USB by Audinate arrived today, the old version with the USB-A connector. I’m still on Kubuntu 18.04 with kxStudio PPAs. The device showed up right away, I could run Jack on it but I was not very pleased to find that it would do plenty of digital clicks when talking to other Dante gear. Sounds exacatly like the AVIO USB is running a different 48khz clock than the rest of the system and every now and then the buffers don’t match any more. (Dante Clock Master is my SQ-5 digital console, the heart of my Dante setup.)
Turns out that I need to re-configure my digital console in Dante Controller in order to make the Avio work with it. (See Dante Troubleshooting : Aviom Blog)
Turns out that my ESI Planet 22cc Dante box does not have this „Enable Sync to External“ so it will probably not operate together properly with the Avio USB.
So this device is apparently not a reliable solution for hooking up 2x2 Dante to any PC. The issue is also present on OS X. Or I’m just wrong and it’s not as simple as it used to be. Which would be nice because I’d have a solution then.
(EDIT: It’s not as simple as that, see postings below… well)
What device latency did you configure?
The default Dante latency is just 1ms, which is 48 samples. Difficult for most machines to handle 48 sample buffer size.
You can configure 2ms or 5ms, but 5ms is 240 samples, which is not a power-of-2 size, so some software doesn’t deal with that well.
Will the driver accept buffer sizes larger than that, and handle the buffer management between the host side and network side, or will it force you to use device buffers the same size as the network buffers?
Turns out that the AVIO series needs a different configuration of your entire Dante thing (as stated above, check the link)… after rebooting my Planet 22c, it sounds more promising. I will keep an ear on it in some more testing! This is a bit frightening since neither the DVS nor other gear had needed this so far.
I checked the latency statistics in Dante controller, there were no dropped samples on the network, the peak sample latency was below 0,5msec.
Turns out that when you do something stupid to the AVIO USB, such as disconnecting the network cable, or rebooting its Dante chip from Dante Controller, your PC or Mac will not like this very much (needed Jack/Ardour restart on Linux, and MixBus, which i use on OS X, had to be killed from the command line).
So a 3,5mm TRS jack is really the safer option. 